


Marked

by ssrhpurgatory



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, Cancer, F/M, Pre-Canon, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Unfulfilled soulmate bond, Unwilling soulmates, but seriously though this is gonna be really angsty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-05
Updated: 2020-09-08
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:20:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26344756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ssrhpurgatory/pseuds/ssrhpurgatory
Summary: Dmitri Vologin knows he'll find his soulmate at Goddard Futuristics. After all, the words are written on his skin, so whoever they are, they must be here.Somewhere.Probably?
Relationships: Alexander Hilbert/Original Female Character
Comments: 10
Kudos: 2





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [No Going Back](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19979005) by [ssrhpurgatory](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ssrhpurgatory/pseuds/ssrhpurgatory). 



> Or: In which the author forcibly reminds herself that there's a good reason she doesn't write AU fic that hews too close to the original narrative she made the character of Alexander Hilbert's Terrifying Lab Manager From The Nineties for, and that if she's going to ship them she's got to send them to an AU where one or the other is capable of change.

Dmitri Vologin had been eleven years old and an orphan when the first words his soulmate would say to him appeared on the skin of his shoulder. Words Dmitri had kept hidden his entire adult life, from the moment he had autonomy over his own body, because of what that English phrase written on his skin marked him as—a defector.

 _Welcome to Goddard Futuristics_ , the wide scrawl of words had said.

Most days, he forgot about it. Most days, he was certain that he would never meet his soulmate, and could not bring himself to care overmuch about it.

Most days, he did not come home from a frustrating day in the lab—spent scrambling to find some way to _make_ his superiors see the promise of his work, as so many days had been spent as of late—to find a very strange man in his apartment with an even stranger job offer.

He had thought it some scheme of Comrade Kinski’s first, had mistaken the man for a thug. But then…

“I’m here on my behalf,” the man said, a little smirk on his face, holding out a business card to Dmitri. “And on behalf of Goddard Futuristics.”

Dmitri had taken the card in fingers gone suddenly numb, had struggled to track the rest of the conversation, had tried not to commit to anything that man proposed. But from that moment, he had known that he would take the offer.

And as dubious as he was about the existence of soulmates, he could not help but feel a sudden spike of anticipation.

Two days later—two very long and sleepless days later, days Dmitri had not entirely been certain he would survive after placing his well-being in the hands of William Carter—and he was waking up in the back of a car as they rolled to a stop. “We’re here. Get out,” Mr. Carter said bluntly, before rolling his window down and leaning out to have a murmured conversation with someone standing by the side of the car.

A conversation Dmitri heard none of as he scooped all of the paperwork that had been dumped on him over the past few days and slid out of the car, standing on legs that were shaking, breathing in air that was so humid it made him feel as if he were drowning. The car pulled away a moment later, and Dmitri looked around, hoping that someone would appear to collect him.

“Welcome to Goddard Futuristics,” a low but decidedly female voice said. Dmitri tried to suppress the jolt those words sent through him and turned his head to squint at the woman who had spoken them. Well, here she was. His soulmate.

Here _she_ was. Not what he had expected, to be honest. And he had rather hoped for the ability to see properly, the first time he met his soulmate, but his glasses were... well, better not to think about where his glasses were.

The woman’s blurry shape had taken a few steps closer, and Dmitri was still staring stupidly at her. At least he could make out details other than wide smudges of color now. From what he could see of her, his soulmate was a decidedly short and fat Black woman in a sternly shoulder-padded teal suit.

And he still had not spoken.

“Are you all right, Dr. Kelley?” The blurry shape of the woman reached out in his direction.

“Menya zahvoot Dmitri Vologin,” he said on instinct, freeing one arm from the papers he had clutched to his chest and taking her reaching hand in his.

If she recognized the words—and how could she? They had been in Russian and this woman was clearly American, from her accent—she did not react to them. All she did was give his hand one firm shake before releasing it. “And I’m very pleased to meet you,” she said, low humor in her voice, “but I’m afraid you’ll find that you’re Dr. Karl Kelley now, and had better get used to it.”

Perhaps she _had_ understood him, if she had known he was introducing himself. But if she had understood him, if those words had been written on her body somewhere, would she not have acknowledged them? He found himself frowning and squinting at her, confused.

There was nothing for it but to force down his disappointment and to forge ahead as if she had not said the words inscribed upon his skin. She might be the first person here to greet him so, but she would certainly not be the last. If she was not his soulmate, then it must be someone else who worked here. “Ah, forgive me. I cannot see well without glasses. Paperwork was difficult to read.”

“Oh!” She exclaimed. “I’ve got something for that.” She produced a small hard case and opened it, revealing the glint of glass and what looked like some rather serious plastic frames. “May I?”

Dmitri nodded. He could probably get the glasses on without dropping the armful of paperwork he was carrying, but in his current state of exhaustion he would not have bet on it happening in a dignified fashion. And even if this woman was not his soulmate, he was fairly certain that he would be working with her in some capacity, and he would rather not make a poor first impression.

She stepped in close and settled the frames carefully on his face, smoothing the arms over his ears and beaming up at him. “We’ll probably want to send you to an optometrist for an adjustment, but these should do for now.”

Dmitri nodded and tried not to think too hard about how they might have gotten ahold of his prescription. “And you are…?”

The woman flashed him another bright smile that made his breath stop in his throat, that left him almost regretting that she was not his soulmate. “Oh, goodness. So sorry. Rosemary Epps.” She looked at him as if that name was supposed to mean something to him, before adding “Your new lab manager,” in a kind voice.

“Ah.”

“Indeed.” She tilted her head to one side and considered him. “You look all done in. Shall we?” She gestured expansively at the nearby building, which Dmitri could now tell appeared to be some sort of residential building. He nodded and followed her, still too exhausted to do much more than respond to her with nods and head shakes. Exhausted enough that when she lead him back to his bedroom and settled him on the bed herself, he was out like a light, his last sight her smiling face, the last words in his ears her calm assurance that he would feel much better in the morning.

He almost believed her.

Rosemary Epps had been twenty years old and pregnant with a child she hadn’t wanted when her soulmark had appeared.

She wasn’t quite sure _when_ it had appeared. Some time after her birthday, of course, and some time before the baby’s, but it must have shown up during those months when she had hated to look down and see that place where, so quickly, the fact that she was carrying a child had started to show. If it hadn’t been for a careless glance in a mirror on the back of the bathroom door, right across from the shower—a mirror she hated the presence of and hung a towel over when she remembered to before showering—she might never had seen it. Though she supposed that one of the nurses overseeing her prenatal care would have pointed it out to her eventually.

These days, the bold Cyrillic print of it was almost illegible, bisected by the curved scar the c-section had left her with, but back then the sight of it had been both startling and unwelcome. It hadn’t exactly been a convenient time, either personally or in a more global sense, to have a soulmark in Cyrillic appear on her body.

Even less convenient was the fact that now, three and a half decades later, her soulmate had finally appeared in her life, as unwelcome as the sudden appearance of his words—his _name_ —on her skin had been, all those years ago.

As she looked down at his sleeping face, she thought she could almost hate him for it.

Thank goodness she’d had time to come to terms with it. Thank goodness she’d had decades of learning how to wear her smiling face like a mask. Thank goodness she hadn’t been holding anything breakable the first time she’d heard Viktor Stukov mention his good friend Dmitri Vologin.

She chewed her lower lip thoughtfully. No, she would not let herself hate him. He didn’t deserve it. It wasn’t his fault that she’d grown too bitter to open her heart to what he was a promise of.

And he would never know her.

She had made certain of that.


	2. Chapter 2

In his first week at Goddard Futuristics, seventeen people welcomed Dmitri Vologin—or rather, Dr. Karl Kelley, a name he was still getting used to—to the company. In his second week he acquired a further six, and his first six months left him with a sum total of forty-two potential soulmates, and no answering spark of recognition in any of their faces as he introduced himself.

He was beginning to think that something had gone horribly wrong.

At least he had his work. And it was easy enough to throw himself into work, here in this top of the line microbiology lab, with the assistance of a pair of part-time lab techs who went about their work quietly and efficiently, with an even-more-efficient Rosemary on call when he needed her, always willing to pick apart whatever tangle his research had knotted itself up in.

Rosemary.

He still thought about that moment when she had greeted him, still remembered the first time he had seen her beaming up at him. Still imagined that she had been the soulmate he had been waiting for so long, though it was clear that she was not.

He discovered quickly that she was not a kind woman. Those smiles of hers had fooled him, had lulled him into a false sense of security when he had first met her. And those smiles had never faded.

But no, she was not a kind woman.

A kind woman would not have dragged him to every mandatory company event, telling him that he was absolutely _not_ allowed to become a recluse. A kind woman would notice his flinch every time he met someone new, and would have given him a reprieve. And a kind woman would not be grinning ear to ear as she dragged him around the company Fourth of July picnic, introducing him to all and sundry.

Dmitri thought that she must have guessed at the words written on his skin, to be so amused by his reaction every time someone welcomed him to Goddard Futuristics.

And it appeared he was not going to escape being subjected to yet another introduction. Rosemary had spent the past 5 minutes chatting with a truly gigantic man Dmitri did not recognize and Dmitri had been considering how best to make a clean getaway. But the instant he started sidling away through the crowd, Rosemary’s eyes flicked up and met his and he was forced to come to a halt.

“Dr. Kelley,” Rosemary said, waving him over with a smile. “Come meet Al.” Dmitri took the few short steps to fetch up at her side with a great deal of reluctance, and Rosemary tucked her right arm through his left, presenting him to the other man. “Albert Bennett, head of security, Dr. Karl Kelley, the new denizen of my virology lab.”

The giant of a man held his hand out to Dmitri. “Welcome to Goddard Futuristics.”

Dmitri looked up (and up and up) as he took the man’s hand. Al Bennett had to be well over six and a half feet tall, and was at least twice as wide as Dmitri himself was.

The words “No. Absolutely not,” burst out of him before he could think of suppressing them.

Al and Rosemary, thank goodness, seemed to find it amusing. Or at least Al let out a great guffaw and slapped his thigh, and Rosemary clapped her free hand over her mouth and almost managed to muffle a scream of laughter of her own. And then she patted him on the upper arm and released him.

“You’ve put in your token appearance, Dr. Kelley,” she said, her eyes still alight with barely-contained amusement. “If you want to run along now, you can.”

Now that he had been offered the chance to leave, he found himself thoroughly reluctant to, though how much that had to do with the way Rosemary had tugged him close to her side in order to prevent his escape, he did not know. All he did know was that, in spite of the heat and humidity, he would give a great deal to be tucked close to her side again.

But instead he mumbled some incoherent platitude in the direction of Al, nodded to Rosemary, and turned his back on them both as he made his way back towards the lab building that Rosemary had extracted him from some hours earlier.

He tried not to feel indignant when a glance backward revealed Rosemary hanging off of Al’s arm the way she had been hanging off of Dmitri’s own, her smiling face turned up towards her companion as if he was the most interesting man in the world.

After all, she was not Dmitri’s soulmate.

Once Dr. Kelley was out of sight, Al interrupted Rosemary’s chatter to frown sternly down at her. “Rosie.”

She blinked innocently up at him. “What?”

“What have you been doing to that damn boy?”

Rosemary forced a smile onto her face. “I’ve been his lab manager, Al.”

“You know that’s not what I’m on about, Rosie.”

“Well, then, you’ll have to clarify.”

“Rosie.” Al let out an exasperated sigh. “You can’t tell me you don’t know what’s written somewhere on that fellow’s body.”

Rosemary realized she was chewing on her lower lip and pasted a smile onto her face instead. “Haven’t the foggiest.”

“Rosemary Abigail Epps, lying is a sin.”

“And I’m not a Christian, darling, so you know that’s not a credible threat.”

“Why haven’t you told him?” Al asked bluntly. By now he had herded her efficiently out of the crowd. He pulled her around a corner, putting the solid barrier of a bush between them and the rest of the company. “Rosie…”

“I doubt he’d want me even if he did know,” Rosemary said quietly. “He...” she trailed off, feeling about ready to cry. Al hadn’t been there, Al hadn’t heard Dmitri Vologin talk about his retrovirus like it was wife, child, and religion. She’d almost considered telling him before that interview, but a man who felt like that about his work didn’t have space in his heart for a soulmate. And Rosemary was done with trailing after people who didn’t have space in their hearts for her.

Al was still looking curiously at her, so Rosemary cleared her throat and told him what he expected to hear. “I think I’m just a little too old to be chasing after childhood daydreams, is all. And I certainly don’t have the time to be, the hours I work.”

Al raised his eyebrows. “So, what, you’re worried he’d reject you because you’re a workaholic?”

“I’m just saying there’s no damn point to having a soulmate I’d never be able to spend any personal time with, is all.” Rosemary shrugged. “And he doesn’t seem to be missing my absence.”

“Aside from jumping out of his skin every time someone welcomes him to Goddard.”

Okay, _that_ she did feel a _little_ bit guilty about. “He’s been here six months. It should slow down soon.”

“And?” Al prompted, raising his eyebrows.

“And I’ll stop dragging him around on introduction tours,” Rosemary added with a sigh of her own. “Though really, you were the last one I wanted to see his reaction to, and what a reaction it was.” She winked up at Al, who rolled his eyes.

“You’re a menace,” he muttered.

“Absolutely. And I’m going back to the picnic.” She paused for a moment and looked coyly up at Al. “You know, I bet you could convince him that his words are somewhere in that morass on your torso, if you wanted him for a bit.” Al was covered, groin to neck, in a densely-packed scrawl of overlapping fragments, the first words of every single one night stand he’d ever had in his life, or so he claimed. Rosemary had never been quite certain about whether or not to take this claim at face value, but even so, it was disturbingly plausible.

Al shook his head. “I don’t poach, Rosie.”

“He might thank you for it.”

Al shook his head again. “Look, I can’t make you do the right thing. And maybe you are right. Maybe he doesn’t have space in his life for anything but his work, and maybe you don’t either. But if you’re wrong—if he wants you like that, if the two of you could make it work if you tried—can you honestly say to me that you’ll have no regrets?”

Rosemary put on her best and brightest smile, ignoring how brittle it felt at that moment. “None at all.”

And then she turned her back on Al and strode away as fast as her legs could take her, not willing to watch that look on his face turn to pity.

After all, she had everything she had ever wanted. Why would she ever risk it all for a slender and unreachable chance at a love she didn’t believe in?


	3. Chapter 3

Eventually, people stopped welcoming him to Goddard Futuristics, and even more eventually, Karl Kelley set his search for Dmitri Vologin’s soulmate aside, along with that name. And most days, he did not think about it, unless that dark scrawl of words on his shoulder happened to catch his eye in the mirror after he was done showering. But Karl Kelley, he had decided, was the sort of man who finished drying his body off and then wrapped his towel around his shoulders like a cape until he went to his bedroom to get dressed.

So most of the time, Karl Kelley completely forgot that he had a soulmate.

But Karl Kelley was going to space in six months, and Karl Kelley had to do a complete and extremely invasive physical, and now that soulmark was recorded in Karl Kelley’s official medical record in a way it had not been before.

The doctor who examined him was kind about it, at least. His eyes had widened at the sight of it, followed by a pitying look that Karl couldn’t quite bring himself to resent. And then he clapped Karl companionably on the shoulder. “You poor bastard.”

Karl laughed bitterly at that. “Ah, you see that, yes? It seems that no one has wanted to claim me yet.”

The doctor winced. “How many contenders?”

Karl hadn’t kept a mental count in years. “At least a hundred,” he guessed.

The doctor held up one finger and unbuttoned his lab coat, then untucked his shirt and pulled the side up. _Nice to meet you_ , the words on his side said.

Karl laughed again, less bitter this time. At last, some man worse off than he was. “Ah, you are poor bastard here, I think.”

The doctor shrugged and let his shirt drop. “You’d think, but I was always careful to make my name be the first thing out of my mouth when meeting new people, so when I met him his eyes lit up in delight and those words just spilled out of his mouth in response. He apologized for them later, but he was the first one to say them to me anyway. You know how most folks are, who care about this sort of thing. Saying all sorts of nonsense.”

“Or always using names.” The thought left him contemplative.

“Who was your first, then?” The doctor asked as he peered down Karl’s ear canal. “Not someone too corporate, I hope?”

“Rosemary Epps.” Her name slipped out before he could think better of it.

The doctor’s only response was a low whistle. “Hell. Doubt that woman has a heart, let alone a soulmark.”

There was no reason to come to her defense, but he felt the urge to. After all, he had seen proof of that heart. It might be the sort of heart to hold the hand of a man everyone else would dismiss as human trash, and to comfort him while he was dying, a brutal, brittle sort of heart that believed no one would do the same for her when she came to her end, but it was a heart all the same.

But no. If he defended her, it would no doubt lead to some rumor linking the two of them together, a rumor that would no doubt make it back to Rosemary herself, and even worse, to Mr. Carter. So Karl laughed instead, and called Rosemary a bitch, and came away from that physical feeling sick and rotten, for all that he had only called her what she had so often called herself.

If there were rumors about his soulmark, he did not hear them himself.

Rosemary found herself missing Dr. Kelley during his months of training for his first space mission, and found herself resenting it. Better for the man to be gone, beyond her reach, so that she couldn’t possibly be tempted by him.

Finding out you were dying did make things like that more tempting, it turned out.

Fucking cancer.

So as much as they had almost become friends in the years since he had joined Goddard Futuristics, she decided she couldn’t be a friend to him right now. She made herself brisk and efficient and utterly hidden behind her mask of smiles, and if Dr. Kelley occasionally gave her strange looks when she treated him coldly instead of with the warmth that always wanted to burst out of her when she was near him, well, that was the price she would have to pay.

Even still, the night before he was supposed to launch, Rosemary found she couldn’t handle being alone. So she’d invited Al over, because he was easy, comfortable company, and because he could distract her if she got too maudlin.

And when a knock at the door had revealed Dr. Kelley, Al abandoned her, like the bastard he was.

Dr. Kelley was shivering. Well, it was raining outside—Rosemary could hear the patter of it on the pavement outside of her apartment. Atowel and her spare robe helped a little bit, and she nudged her thermostat up a few degrees too. And then, for the lack of any better idea, she invited him into her living room and offered him some whiskey.

He shook his head and remained standing. “I should not drink before launch.” He sighed. “I should not be here.”

No, he shouldn’t. The quarantine facilities were secure enough that he must have staged quite the breakout. “Why _are_ you here?”

He looked at her, the expression on his face inexpressibly soft for a moment. “I did not say goodbye.”

Oh, those words hurt, like he’d stabbed a knife into her chest. So she pasted a smile onto her face. “I can’t think why you’d need to. You’ll be sending me weekly reports. It’ll be like you never left.”

He looked awkwardly off to one side. “Of course. I…” his face twisted, as if he was finding this as painful as she was finding it herself. “I still did not want to go without saying goodbye. Just… just in case.” And then he looked back at her, and oh, god, if she didn’t know better, she’d think he felt something for her.

And at the sight of that look on his face, she was tempted, just for a moment, to do something foolish. Tempted for a moment to open up her robe and reveal the broken wreck of his words, where they could still be seen on her stomach, tempted for a moment to keep him at her side for just one night. Tempted to send him to space with the knowledge that his soulmate was here, had been here all along, and that with what little ability to love she had remaining to her, she loved him.

Tempted, because she knew she would most likely be dead and buried by the time he returned.

Better to never show him. Better to leave him wondering if his soul mate really had been here. Better to keep him from feeling _that_ pain, if she could.

Better to die alone.

Because everyone did, in the end.

So instead of showing him, she reached out and grabbed him, hugged him as close and tight as she dared, and buried her face against his chest. Just for a moment, and then a moment longer, as his arms came around her and he clung to her as well.

She was almost ready to cry when they finally released one another. “Come back,” she told him, trying not to let her desperation reach her voice. “It will be horribly inconvenient if you die out there. I don’t know who I could _possibly_ give your research to.”

It had been a poor attempt at a joke, but he let out a soft chuckle all the same. And then, so swiftly she thought that the decision to do so had bypassed his brain entirely, he reached up to cup her cheek and leaned back in to press a swift, familiar little kiss between her brows.

That put an end to the casual comfort that had been between them. Suddenly he was stiff and awkward, clearly aware of that unconscious action as an overstep. Never mind that some part of Rosemary wanted to pull him down and kiss him full on the mouth, a realization that had her taking a hasty step back from him.

He looked at her wide-eyed. “I am sorry. I did not intend—“

Rosemary held up a stilling hand. “It’s fine.” She swallowed hard and pasted a bright smile on her face. “It was just that sort of moment, I suspect,” she added.

Dr. Kelley was still studying her with wide, cautious eyes, but he nodded a hesitant agreement. “I should go.”

Rosemary nodded again. “Be safe. I mean it. You’re irreplaceable.” Perhaps only to her, but he was.

He gave her a wan smile. “I am certain that if something happens to me, you will find yourself another virologist.”

“Not one as good as you.”

“Such flattery. I might actually believe you will miss me, now,” he said drily.

There. The tension between them dissipated, and Rosemary found herself capable of smiling properly at him. “I will.”

And she would.

For as long as she lived.


	4. Chapter 4

A year and a half in space had been enough to make a whole new person out of Karl Kelley.

Fortunate, then, that they had a whole new name waiting for him when he returned to Earth. Goddard Futuristics had been running experiments that were blatant human rights violations for decades, and someone had finally exposed them, and Dr. Karl Kelley had been caught in the backlash before being expelled from the company in disgrace.

A month later, time enough to remember how to move under the influence of gravity, and Dr. Marius Vandersee was hired and installed in a lab that seemed as if it had not changed at all, even as everything else had shifted beyond recognition. It felt as if half of Goddard’s campus was under construction, a new wing being added to the biochem research facility, new apartment blocks, two new administration buildings and a new and specialized Engineering lab. And new management, at every level. Charles Kerr, the new head of Communications—and oh, what a transformation that was; if Marius had not known Mr. Carter so well by gesture and voice, he might never have guessed—had visited Marius in his month of seclusion and had assured him that it was part of a necessary corporate restructuring, in the same breath as he assured Marius that he still had a place at Goddard Futuristics.

Marius saw Rosemary only once during his first few weeks back on the job, sitting in on his initial interview with Ron and Jerry, the two young men who now managed the biochem research department in her stead. Her cheeks had seemed hollow, her cheekbones protruding, the dark circles under her eyes impossible to hide under makeup. A long illness, he suspected, or perhaps an ongoing one, though she escaped the meeting before he could ask.

It felt wrong, calling down to the office that had once been hers, only for one of her replacements to answer it. And it was clear that they planned to be more hands-off than Rosemary had been; there were no more long afternoons in that office, a pot of coffee between them as they picked their way through his most recent set of results together. No more helpful suggestions of papers to read, no more sharp questions that cut through his fumbling attempts to make sense out of something he did not understand yet, only to lead him to the core of whatever problem was baffling him. Neither Ron nor Jerry, it seemed, had the background to do what Rosemary had done so easily, and neither seemed to be in any hurry to develop the skills that had made her so effective as a lab manager.

After seven years of a lab manager who anticipated his every need, the necessity of filling out requisition forms was a bit of a letdown.

But more depressing was the fact that Rosemary seemed to be avoiding him. He did not understand why—had they not been friends, of a sort? And now that she was no longer his manager, could they not let that friendship develop?—but it was clear from the way she had always just stepped out of her office when he swung by to see if he could get a moment of her time, clear from the way that if he happened to catch sight of one of her bright suits in the distance, she always disappeared from view a moment later.

He would have savored the terse communiques about his research that they had exchanged during his months in space more if he had known that what awaited him after his return to Earth was silence. It was a comfort, at least, to know that she was still there, even if she wanted none of him.

A Goddard Futuristics without Rosemary Epps would have been a desolate place indeed.

Like she had with so many other things in her life, Rosemary Epps had put off dying because Goddard Futuristics still needed her.

With her soulmate’s return to Earth, Rosemary had started to wish that she had turned Miranda down when the other woman had come to her to offer some rather drastic interventions, all in the name of buying Rosemary a year or two more. But Rosemary had hated her illness, had hated how weak chemotherapy had left her, and had been willing to take what Miranda offered.

She just hadn’t thought through all the consequences of it.

At least he was easy to avoid. Though perhaps she should have expected what came next, one morning when she hadn’t been able to force breakfast down her throat, one morning when she had been having a little chat with Ron and Jerry about how to run an efficient department, and had stood too quickly, only to have the world go black around her.

She woke up on the floor and, with Ron’s help and in a daze, levered herself to a sitting position against the wall. And she was still in a daze when Dr. Marius Vandersee appeared in the doorway to the office, trailing along in Jerry’s wake.

“Oh. You.”

His face had been panic-stricken when he had first entered the room, but it softened at her bitter words, showing his clear relief that she was both conscious and cognizant enough of her surroundings to recognize him. “What have you been doing to yourself, suka?”

The casual insult, a long-running joke between the pair of them, slipped out like an endearment. Rosemary winced. Oh, she had let herself get too close to this man. The distance of almost two years let her see that now, far more clearly than she had been able to see it when he had left for space. “I fell over. I’m fine now.”

But he would not believe her, and she could not blame him. Not when her first attempt to struggle back to her feet lead to another swoon that had her sagging back against the wall. He managed to chase Ron and Jerry out of the office—out of their office, she was amused to note—with an efficiency that matched her own, and then knelt on the floor at her side in order to give her an impromptu examination.

Careful fingers skated over the bump he discovered on her scalp, moved on to a further examination, froze when they encountered the swollen lymph nodes in her neck. His eyes went wide and panicked behind the round lenses of his glasses as she swatted him away, too late, far too late.

“Tell me,” he said.

So she told him in the most direct way she could manage, rolling up her sleeve to reveal the PICC line that still rested in the crook of her elbow. He swallowed hard at the sight of it, his eyes very wide and blinking frequently, as if he was forcing away tears.

“Cancer?”

“Yes.” And might as well be honest about it all. “And once it became clear that it was a matter of when and not if, Pryce put some stopgap measures in place to keep me ticking along a little bit longer.”

“How long have you known?” His voice was a wreck, tight and harsh as it emerged from his throat, and she knew she was only going to cause him more pain, no matter what she said next.

“Does it matter?”

But her deflection wasn’t enough; his eyes fixed on her face, far too keen for her liking. “Before I left, then. I came to you that night, and you—“ his voice choked off in his throat, and he jerked his head around, looking steadily at the wall beyond her until he regained apparent control over his emotions. “You were there, telling me to come back. And you were hiding _this_.”

“Would it have done you any good to know?”

He looked at her again, and she forced herself to look him straight in the eye, to accept that she had caused this pain, that perhaps he wasn’t quite so indifferent to her as she had always thought. To accept that maybe, if she had had the courage to, she could have had him by her side these past seven years, in whatever way he was willing to give himself to her.

Too late for that now.

She saw it, the moment of acceptance on his face. The moment he realized that it wouldn’t have done either of them any good, him knowing she had been dying by inches the entire time he’d been gone. The moment he accepted that they were nothing to each other.

And then he opened his mouth, and words she had never expected came out, fast and desperate and pleading, and she realized he had accepted no such thing. “Decima. I know I have not done any trials with cancer, but it could—it might—“

Rosemary held up a silencing hand. “No.”

“I made progress—“

“And you’re forgetting that I read all your damn reports, and that your most recent test subject is a cadaver and has been for the past seven months.”

But it was clear he was unwilling to leave it there. “Would it be worse than this?” he asked, still pleading. “My way, there is a chance of success. And you have admitted to me that whatever measures Dr. Pryce took, they have not been enough.”

An admission she regretted making. But she lifted her chin stubbornly, staring him down. “Only if you can promise me one thing.”

He snatched up her hand in both of his, clung to it. “Anything. Just give me that chance.”

Rosemary shook her head. “No. Offer it because my subject knowledge makes me a good test subject. Offer it because I’m dying anyway, and this is a good way to use the rest of me up. But don’t you dare think of this as a chance, Dmitri.”

He flinched at her use of his birth name, released her hand from his and sat back on his haunches in order to study her cautiously. Rosemary kept her gaze locked firmly on his face, unwilling to show even the slightest bit of weakness. But as the silence stretched onward, she found it too painful to endure.

“Come on, darling. Don’t act like it’s a tough decision, treating me like all the others. You don’t even like me.”

He flinched again at that, one hand going to the ground to prevent him from falling over, the other clenching into a fist, pressed tight to his chest, right over his heart. And oh, she might have hurt him worse than she had intended with those words, but she could not bring herself to regret their necessity.

“I understand,” he finally said, his voice tight and harsh in his throat once more, his face still wracked with pain. “Yes, I can do that.”

“Good.”

She had forced him to say the words, but Marius Vandersee had continued to believe that he would find a way to save her. The thought of Goddard Futuristics without Rosemary was not one he could bear, now that he was faced with its certainty.

He wished he had forced himself to accept it when she had demanded that from him. Perhaps it would not hurt so much now to look down on her comatose body, to see the wreck that Decima had made of her. If there was anything left of her in that body, there had been no sign of it, not for weeks. Not since Dr. Pryce had invaded this room as Rosemary had slipped from consciousness, her body wracked by fever and infection, telling him that if he was not going to save Rosemary, it was time to give her a chance to try.

Whatever Dr. Pryce had done with that machine of hers had taken all that remained of the fight left in Rosemary’s body, had wiped out what brain activity had remained. But for all that he knew that the body in front of him was just a shell, that it was only through the intervention of the tubes and wires that Rosemary was hooked up to that she remained breathing at all, he fought against the necessity of ending it all.

He did not know what to do with himself.

Even the nurse who came in each day to change bandages and see to Rosemary's physical needs seemed to have given up on the matter. She had not come in that day at all.

Marius clenched his jaw. Very well, he would take care of her himself. For as long as it took for Decima to do its work, for as long as it took for her to come back. Never mind that there was no sign left of that brilliant mind of hers, never mind that she had not been able to breathe on her own in weeks, never mind that she had made him promise no extreme measures before he had given her the first injection. He could fix this, even still.

Start small, he decided. The bandages that covered the open sores Decima had left her with had not been changed in more than a day. He began with those, peeling them away a bit at a time, ignoring the way her limbs hung loose and limp as he manipulated them, ignoring the way she was less than half the weight she had once been, her bones protruding painfully at every joint, her skin hanging loose, like an ill-fitting set of clothing.

He hesitated just a moment before opening up the hospital gown she wore. This was why she had insisted on the nurse, after all, claiming that she did not feel comfortable exposing her naked body to a coworker. Bu her body was the same as any other, and he found himself able to go about his work untroubled by the knowledge that this body belonged to Rosemary Epps.

Or at least until he peeled back the bandage over her lower abdomen, exposing the sweeping curve of a c-section scar, untouched by the sores that riddled the rest of her skin.

He never would have guessed that she had once been a mother.

And then he noticed the dark letters that the curve of that scar cut in half, noticed the way they had been sewn back together, just out of true. So. She did have a soulmark. Marius found himself almost smiling, a bitter sort of smile, at the memory of that long-ago conversation with a man whose name he had never learned. Well, here was proof that she could not possibly be so heartless as that man had supposed her.

It was an invasion she would never forgive, he knew it, but she was not here to protest. He tilted his head to one side and studied the letters, wondering what her soulmate’s first words to her had been, wondering what had happened to that person and the child she had so obviously borne. It took him a moment—a disturbingly long moment, in which he doubted the truth of his gaze—until a second careful study of those disconnected marks confirmed the true horror of them.

There was a ringing in his ears, a pounding in his chest. Quite against his own will, Dmitri found himself sitting down hard on the linoleum floor of the quarantine room, resenting the bulky gear that kept him from burying his face in his hands and screaming the way he wanted to.

Perhaps if the words had been more damaged. Perhaps if his mother tongue had gone more fuzzy and distant in his mind than seven years of disuse had left it. Perhaps then, he might never have known the truth of how things were between them.

But now he did.

“Why? Why would you do this?” he asked, the words wrenching their way past his clenched jaw, forcing themselves out into the open air. “Did you hate me so much, Rosemary? Was I so repulsive to you, that you could not even bear to tell me before we came to this?”

There was no answer.

And there never would be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The main reason I haven't written the later chapters of the Ridiculous Hilbert Backstory Fic that this is ostensibly based on? Writing this condensed version of their arc made me cry so hard I couldn't see, and doing that for chapters and chapters is absolutely unbearable.


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